One day after we reported that Donald Trump Jr. has privately broken with his father over the Iran war, Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir (PLTR) co-founder who was the first big tech investor to back Trump in 2016 and the biggest funder of super PACs behind JD Vance's 2022 Senate run, has also drawn a line in the sand over Trump's defining foreign-policy gamble.
In audio from an Oct. 12 private lecture in Nashville obtained by Decoded by POLITICO (Calder McHugh), Thiel told the room:
"I'm skeptical of [the war], I think we should not have done it. There were a lot of mistakes that were made."
"Maybe we don't have the hard power. Maybe we're going to lose the soft power war."
In other words, one of the architects of the MAGA-tech alliance now thinks the war was a mistake and that America may not be strong enough to finish it. The scoop crossed overnight:
🚨🇺🇸🇮🇷 Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s most influential billionaire backers, says the Iran war was a MISTAKE
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) October 22, 2026
“I think we should not have done it. There were a lot of mistakes that were made.”
Thiel made the comments last week during a private lecture in Nashville.
He also raised… pic.twitter.com/FkTnpb91sm
Thiel on the Iran war: "I think we should not have done it" https://t.co/0JG5vUcY0r
— Alex Burns (@alexanderburns) October 22, 2026
Below we walk through what Thiel said, the even stranger parts of the lecture, and why it lands at exactly the wrong moment for the White House.
"The Sword Of Damocles"
Per Politico, Thiel spent much of the lecture on what he called the unchecked power of the International Criminal Court, drawing on Rumsfeld and Cheney, and then said this:
"I read the Cheney family's Trump derangement syndrome as an attempt to buy favor with the [International Criminal Court] and avoid prosecution. Probably too late... And I have come to suspect that the threat of an ICC arrest warrant is the sword of Damocles hanging over the Trump administration as it tries to persecute this war in Iran."
("Persecute" is the word in Politico's transcript. We assume he meant "prosecute," though at this point in the war, who knows.) Translation: the president's most cerebral backer is publicly speculating that Trump officials face war-crimes exposure. Very reassuring.
Thiel also recounted a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in early 2024, after Oct. 7, in which he asked about Israel's plans for Gaza. According to Thiel, Netanyahu replied: "I can't just Dresdenize it," a reference to the Allied firebombing that killed roughly 25,000 people.
Still On Team Trump (Sort Of)
To be fair, Thiel didn't defect. Politico says he "highlighted his continued support of Trump and suggested he wanted to protect the president," and framed his critique as opposition to neoconservatives and Middle East wars rather than to Trump personally. That's the Vance-wing argument, and Politico reported back in March that Vance himself was "skeptical" of striking Iran before the war began. Neither Thiel's representatives nor the White House responded to Politico. Put differently, this is the restrainer wing of the coalition saying in private what it can't say from the podium, and the audio got out 12 days before the Nov. 3 midterms.
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